TEMPE – Arizona’s Derrick Williams had 20 points. Solomon Hill had 5. And Kevin Parrom had four and a huge foul.

Arizona won 77-58 here at Wells Fargo Arena.

“We’re not young anymore,’’ said a beaming Jamelle Horne, a junior and one of the team leaders. “Put that in the newspaper.’’

If I had one I would. So, it’ll be on the Internet and the blog. It should be stop-the-presses stuff but instead its here. Such is life for the Cats and the news. All of sudden it’s hitting them and they are growing up.

Arizona coach Sean Miller was so giddy – OK, he doesn’t get giddy – about the win that he admitted that Horne “inspired’’ him in the second half. And just earlier, Miller was ripping into him to get better or at least show a better energy than he did in the first half. He had 11 second half points, hitting four of five shots.

“I tried to tell anything I could to get him to play,’’ said Miller, stopping short of saying he was on him like no other time. “Jamelle is talented and is important. I felt that early he let a couple of his missed shots affect him. But to his credit he came out in the second half and really played well.’’

The entire team did, hitting 75 percent of its shots in the second half against an Arizona State defense everyone said was pretty stout. Well, it showed holes and UA found them.

And it leads to the acknowledgment that UA is getting better, something Miller said was happening this week at his weekly press conference.

“I really believe our team is getting better, sometimes it is by an inch,’’ Miller said. “It doesn’t mean that all of a sudden we’re going to go on this big winning streak but just on a daily basis coming from where we came from in October … because we are so young and new we have an advantage to get better.’’

The victory even had senior Nic Wise waxing poetic about how the rivalry is back to how it should be. “This is what it has been,’’ Wise said, perhaps going a bit far in that ASU had a five-game win streak against UA. “The last couple of years they’ve had a great player in James Harden. He did a great job of propelling their teams to wins. This year it’s a different game and different story.’’

Indeed. UA has grown up and there’s still two months – and dare we say possibly more – of the season left.

NOTABLE
UA freshman Kevin Parrom did not get ejected from the game on his hard foul on Ty Abbott. He fouled out. It was his fifth foul on his hard foul on Abbott with about 8:35 left in the game.

This entry was posted on Saturday, January 23rd, 2010 at 11:01 pm and is filed under Sports. Tags for this post: Derrick Williams, Jamelle Horne, Kevin Parrom, Sean Miller. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.